Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing by Elizabeth Fowler

Abstract

REVIEWS offer a slightly different, though no less learned, perspective on medieval women’s cultural commitments. The pupil of Cambridge reformer and martyr Thomas Bilney, Manne received economic, spiritual, and political support from influential and distinguished patrons. Erler suggests that Bilney gave Manne copies of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man and the New Testament, though the anchoress evidently escaped her mentor’s fate. Erler concludes that Manne remains one of the few identifiable female participants in ‘‘the 1520s and 1530s nexus of theological and political issues’’ (p. 106). Elizabeth Throckmorton, abbess of the Franciscan community at Denny, was a contemporary of Manne’s and also a reader of Tyndale. London merchant Humphrey Monmouth sent her his copy of Tyndale’s translation of Enchiridion, Erasmus’s critique of corruption and greed in the established church. With her sisters and other family members, Throckmorton apparently sought ‘‘fresh vernacular treatments of spiritual and intellectual concerns’’ (p. 114). The book’s final chapter explores surviving incunabula and identifies what we might call the ‘‘best-sellers’’ of early printed books among women. Erler’s three appendices likewise contribute significantly to our understanding of medieval women’s literacy, book ownership, and patronage . Appendix I offers a list of surviving books owned by medieval religious women and religious not identified by Ker-Watson or Bell; Appendix II tracks multiple book ownership by medieval religious women; and Appendix III details the surviving copies of incunabula owned by women. The book is superbly researched and bolstered by substantial endnotes. Ultimately, this short book raises more questions than it answers, but this in no way diminishes its value. Further scholarship will amplify the stories that Erler tells here and will tease out their implications, interconnections, and theoretical dimensions. In the meantime, this book advances enormously our understanding of medieval women. Anne Clark Bartlett DePaul University Elizabeth Fowler. Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 263. $45.00. The main title of this ambitious, learned, and complex book should not mislead any reader whose notions of literary character are based on the PAGE 391 391 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:37 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER novel and nineteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare. Elizabeth Fowler’s principal purpose is to theorize, historicize, and complicate the idea of ‘‘literary character’’ as it applies to ‘‘Early English Writing.’’ Her aim is not primarily to analyze literary characters but to demonstrate the processes by which literary character gets made and is understood by the reader. Her principal topic is ‘‘social persons,’’ which she defines as ‘‘a paradigmatic representation of personhood that has evolved historically among the institutions of social life’’ (p. 2n; Fowler’s emphasis). The lead footnote in three of the main chapters refers the reader back to the introductory discussion of this term, ‘‘which is central to the argument of the book.’’ The ‘‘Human Figure’’ here includes not only characters in fiction such as Chaucer’s fictional pilgrims (the dramatis personae in what Kittredge described as Chaucer’s ‘‘Human Comedy’’), but personifications such as ‘‘Mede the maid’’ in Passus II–IV of Piers Plowman and the River Thames in Book IV, canto 11, of The Faerie Queene. Although she refers widely to literary history and other disciplines, especially legal history, Fowler disclaims any intent of writing a comprehensive theory or study of character in the period she designates as Early English. Rather, her book focuses on texts by four authors, each selected to illustrate a different aspect of the category ‘‘social person.’’ The main texts are Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, Langland’s Passus II–IV (the Marriage of Lady Mede), Skelton’s The Tunnynge of Elynour Rummynge , and Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh, cantos 11–12 of Book IV, the The Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, and A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande. A ‘‘social person’’ is one of many conventions through which we are ‘‘habituated’’ by experience and by reading to apprehend and understand literary characters; a literary character ‘‘is cobbled together out of allusions to a number of social persons’’ (p. 17). Thus the ideals, crusades , lords, demeanor, and costume in...